Waterfront plan revives debate

U-T San Diego’s proposal would include new stadium, expanded convention center

A proposal by U-T San Diego’s ownership and opinion arm that champions a football stadium, a sports arena and an expanded convention center along San Diego’s waterfront has revived a public debate over 96 acres of land long coveted by developers.

Padres owner John Moores first suggested a stadium at the 10th Avenue Marine Terminal in 2004, but the idea has been rebuffed so often by labor officials and the Port of San Diego that the Chargers always discounted the option.

Until now.

Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani on Monday called a waterfront stadium viable, but emphasized the team remains committed to pursuing a $1 billion stadium at the Metropolitan Transit System bus yard in East Village.

“If we can, obviously, that will be the direction everyone heads off in,” Fabiani said. “If we can’t, I presume that discussions about 10th Avenue will continue and even intensify.”

Ultimately, prospects for a waterfront overhaul — projected to cost at least $1.5 billion — hinge less on the Chargers and more on how the plan is received at City Hall and the terminal’s loading docks.

Lorena Gonzalez, secretary-treasurer of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, said Monday that she was willing to listen.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders declined to comment, and in the afternoon, spokesman Darren Pudgil quipped: “Interestingly, no other media outlets have called us on this aside from City News Service. They all might be on storm watch.”

With words aimed directly at Sanders, one of the Sunday U-T San Diego opinion pieces called it “misguided and in key ways self-defeating for city leaders to pursue building a stadium and expanding the Convention Center as separate initiatives.”

The editorial recommends an even bigger convention center and a larger stadium, saying the combination would generate more jobs and revenue for the region.

Either approach faces funding and regulatory challenges.

On Monday, a formal statement from the Mayor’s Office read: “The city is ready to move forward now on a realistic plan to create thousands of jobs, protect our convention business and increase revenues for neighborhood services. We have to address these important priorities in a responsible way.”

In a move that came seven weeks after developer Douglas F. Manchester and former radio executive John T. Lynch bought the U-T, editorials advocating for a transformed waterfront dominated Sunday’s front page and Opinion section.

Lynch has embraced the idea since at least 2006, using the sports radio station he owned at the time — 1090-AM — to air supportive editorials. Manchester sold his namesake Grand Hyatt in the area last year and is trying to develop the downtown Navy Broadway Complex. He does not want to build any part of the 10th Avenue project, Lynch said Monday.

“We firmly believe this is a better way to go,” said Lynch, vice chairman and CEO of the U-T. “There’s no question that piecemeal, these are much harder things to accomplish than with a grand vision and a grand financing plan.”

Lynch said he and Manchester originally discussed a waterfront stadium in 2004.

It was an idea that members of then-Mayor Dick Murphy’s Citizens Task Force on Chargers Issues never seriously considered while meeting in 2002 and 2003.

“If you could get it done over all the regulatory and legislative hurdles, it would be a tremendous asset to San Diego,” Fabiani said Monday. “The constant in all of this is organized labor. If they’re against it, they’re going to block whatever you need to do.”

The new proposal would need approval from the port, the city, the county, the state Legislature, the state Lands Commission, the state Coastal Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And that’s just what Gonzalez listed Sunday on Twitter as a broader civic discussion got under way. A day later, she tweeted, “I’ve talked more about bananas in the last 24 hours than I would like to admit.”

Her priority is saving hundreds of jobs, including those of some 200 longshore workers who unload 185 million bananas and other items at the terminal each month.

In the Sunday opinion pieces, the U-T ownership said its vision would protect those jobs for an unspecified “short to medium term” while creating thousands of construction and other permanent positions. On Monday, Lynch said there could be 20,000 new jobs.

Describing reactions to the plan she has heard, Gonzalez said: “I think we have some folks who work down on the waterfront who are pissed. I think we have people who are excited about a possibility, but I haven’t talked to anyone who saw the artists’ rendering and thought that was actually achievable.”

Former port chairman Peter Q. Davis views the economics another way.

“You’d have more jobs with this new development than you’d lose,” he said.

In 2004, port commissioners voted 6-1, with Davis the lone dissenter, to “permanently terminate” consideration of a stadium at the 10th Avenue site. It was the first of several times the idea was shot down over the years.

In 2008, 70 percent of voters defeated a ballot measure to redevelop the waterfront with a stadium and other uses on a deck above the maritime activity.

A year later, then-port commission chairman Stephen Cushman said a waterfront stadium was “impossible” and precluded by the law that created the port district in 1962.

“It is time for all idle speculation about such a development to stop,” Cushman said at the time.

On Monday, Cushman declined to say if he still felt that way, noting that a new Chargers stadium is not his focus as the mayor’s point person for expanding the convention center. Asked if people should read that as a softening of his position or as diplomacy, Cushman said again his focus was the convention space.

Port officials didn’t talk publicly about the waterfront idea Monday.

Saying the agency needed more time, port spokesman Ron Powell declined to answer questions such as how much maritime revenue and tonnage the 10th Avenue Marine Terminal bring in each year.

Kelly Cunningham, senior fellow and economist for the National University System Institute for Policy Research, wrote a study in 2008 that said the annual economic impact of the Port of San Diego’s two maritime terminals is equal to that of 4.5 Super Bowls.

Monday, he said the impact will be less in a down economy, but that the port’s proximity is important to many local companies. “If it turned into something else, it can never be recaptured as a port,” Cunningham said. “There are a lot more options for putting a football stadium.”

Lynch said Monday that reaction to the waterfront proposal has been mixed, but stressed that the aim is to make San Diego “a world-class city again.”

“I see some of the comments being negative and all, but nobody is trying to do anything except get the city moving again economically,” he said. “We were never intending to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’. We were trying to paint a vision.”